Applicom

Task list templates in Apollo!

Hi there,

We released Apollo a couple of days ago... and we are already busy releasing new important features!

One of them is task list templates, which are now available in Apollo. This is great news for all those users with set processes in place, and who have a set of tasks they complete in every project.

To create a task list template simply go open up your project: in the dashboard, you will see the "Templates" menu, which allows you to create task list templates you can reuse across your projects.

For example, if you are planning on starting a house building business, you might end up with a template like this:

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Yes, we are finally releasing plans!

Hello friends,

Our journey with Apollo is about to have a major breakthrough; we are excited about this, and would love to share this with you, our users. So, here is the scoop:

We are about to release plans. This means that Apollo is about to become a paid service!

There are several reasons for this -- and they aren't exactly what you would expect. The main reason is that Apollo is now a mature product. When we launched Apollo in July 2010, people asked us: "Is it safe to use? If I put my task list in there, is it going to be there tomorrow?".

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Finally here: Basecamp import, and data export

Hi Friends! We introduced two features: a Basecamp-compatible data import, and a comprehensive data export for Apollo. These features are amongst the most-wanted ones, and have far-fetching implications.

Migrating to Apollo can be challenging: you might have several projects with valuable comments in a different project management system. This is why we worked really hard to write an import procedure that allows you to import your project from a Basecamp-compatible XML file:

This means that your projects, notes, milestones, etc. will appear on your Apollo workspace.

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Applicom, the maker of Apollo project management and CRM, is not for sale: our users come first

In the last few years, a number of web-based project management solutions appeared. A great number of them. I should know: Apollo is one of them. We started building Apollo when the market wasn't as crowded (although it was starting), and waited a long time before releasing it to the public; the main reason is that we didn't want to put out there something that we wouldn't use. And we were picky. Very picky.

Apollo is still missing some of the features we considered (and consider) crucial.

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Creating a universal nag message for people using old browsers

Nobody seems to talk about the "war of the browsers" anymore. Let's go back in time: First Netscape won, then Internet Explorer won, and then Firefox arrived and got half the market back, while Safari got its sizeable slice, Opera always stuck at 2%, and now it's Google Chrome on the rising -- so, in the end, and thank goodness, nobody won.

Today, it's not about winning the war of the browsers: it's about winning the war to kill old browsers, which are seriously slowing innovation down to a crawl. As Apollo's developers, we know this very well: we battle problems with old browsers every day.

Chrome auto-updates itself. Pretty much every Chrome user is now using Chrome 8, regardless of their OS policy to software upgrades. Firefox is following Chrome's steps, doing an auto-update to its latest version automatically. Internet Explorer users, on the other hand, are less lucky: there are tons of IE 6 users, lots of IE7 and a small army of IE8 users. There are also people using old versions of Firefox, Safari or Opera (although they are a minority).

It's time to stop this. Here is my proposal.

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Apollo: going forward, and enjoying the ride!

When we started working on Apollo, we didn't quite know what to expect. We had several possible scenarios, but nothing was set in stone. We launched Apollo on the 27th of July, and we have been sending invites out ever since. For us, having Apollo as an invite-only application was important so that we could establish some kind of contact with our users; for each one of them, we tried to start a conversation.

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Small teams don't need complex project management, they need effective project communication.

At the beginning, it was project management: it was basically a science, with its own specialised vocabulary and wide range of software options to actually apply that science. This science included contracts, budgeting, very refined task, sub task, sub-sub task breakdown, dependencies, complex graphs, time estimates, etc. A few people, the "project managers", were masters at finding their way in this little jungle of terms, rules, and methods.

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Listen to others, but always trust yourself. Always.

Imagine that you sell product X. X here could be anything: to me, right now, X is Apollo, a piece of project management software that allows you to manage and organise your working and personal life. But that's just an example -- you could be selling cakes. After a while, and a lot of hard work, you become popular: people buy your cakes (and my software), and things are cruising along nicely. As you become more and more renowned, your customers start coming up with more specific requests.

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Waking up to a mad morning

We woke up this morning in a bit of a situation. We opened up our company inbox, and discovered some 140 emails waiting to be answered: they were invite requests.

We decided to start as "invite only" mainly because we wanted to establish a 1:1 connection with our users. That's also why we asked you to actually send us an email, rather than filling in a form with your email address: we wanted to see how you would ask for an invite, have a look at your company's website and blog, and possibly start a conversation with you.

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New features for Apollo: themes and your company's logo

We are working very hard on Apollo right now. We are very open about our roadmap, and anybody who has emailed us over the last couple of weeks knows exactly what we are doing.

We have just rolled out, for all the workspaces, two new -- and important -- features.

The first one is the possibility to upload your own company's logo in Apollo:

UPDATE: Yes transparent PNGs are now supported!

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